Designed landscape feature, Windfield Demesne, Co. Galway

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape feature, Windfield Demesne, Co. Galway

In a field of gently rolling Galway pastureland, there is a circular hollow about twenty metres across and two metres deep that fills with water after rain.

To a passing eye it looks like little more than a waterlogged dip in the ground. What it once was, however, is considerably more deliberate: the ghost of an ornamental planting, a designed feature of a now-vanished demesne landscape.

The site sits on what was formerly the land of Windfield Demesne, and the older maps tell a clearer story than the ground does today. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a large, roughly subrectangular enclosure of trees on this spot, running approximately 58 metres west-northwest to east-southeast and about 51 metres north-northeast to south-southwest. The same feature appears again on the more detailed OS 1:2500 plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916, still intact at that point. Enclosed tree copses of this kind were a common element of eighteenth and nineteenth-century demesne design, used to create visual punctuation in a managed landscape, to screen service areas, or simply to give shape and enclosure to open ground. At Windfield, the trees have since been cleared entirely, leaving only the pit, which is likely the remnant of the planting bed or a decorative hollow that once sat within or beneath the canopy.

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Pete F
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